Monday, October 31, 2005

The Samuel Alito Seat

The National Women's Law Center says it will attempt to thwart Alito's confirmation with a multi-million dollar media blitz that will hit two points: Alito's judicial record, and making "sure the American public understands that this is for the Sandra Day O'Connor seat."

But if Alito has been nominated for the "O'Connor seat," then it's equally true that O'Connor occupies the Potter Stewart seat, since that's the justice O'Connor replaced. But of course she doesn't really occupy the Potter Stewart seat since Stewart was merely occupying the seat of Harold Burton, who occupied the seat of Owen Roberts, who took the seat of Edward Sanford, who took that of Mahlon Pitney, who took the seat of John Marshall Harlan, who took that of David Davis, who occupied the seat of John Campbell, who had the seat of John McKinley, who was the first to occupy the new seat created when the Supreme Court was expanded from six to nine justices in 1837.

It doesn't have the same ring to it, but Alito has been nominated for the McKinley seat. He'll undoubtedly be heads and shoulders above all of its former occupants, none of whom left a lasting mark on the law. (Though Harlan and Stewart both have a couple of famous cites to their credit.)

2 Comments:

I'm not sure how you can say that about O'Connor. Sure, she was no great legal mind. But she was the decisive vote in dozens of major cases and wrote several ill-thought-out majority opinions in those cases that will haunt us for decades to come.

I am not sure how you can say that about John Marshall Harlan, who was the sole dissenting vote in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the case that approved "separate but equal".

Henry Abraham in his book "Justices and Presidents", vol 1 and vol 2 (and presumably Vol 3), notes that John Marshall Harlan has regularly been given the highest marks by legal experts and historians who study the US Supreme Court.